Sacramento It looks like Los Angeles citizens will vote in June on whether to require porn actors to wear condoms on screen. Although state law already requires condom use during such “acting,” activists will apparently have the signatures to put a measure on the ballot to tie the granting of city permits to safe-sex behavior — thus raising the possibility of a new LA city-job classification: Prophylactic Inspector II, complete with a defined-benefit pension and six weeks of annual vacation.

Angelenos aren’t the only Californians who must consider answers to some questions no one should be asking.

Some of the silly initiatives now seeking signatures statewide include one to require state and local governments “to use only products made in the United States,” another to deem homeownership a “fundamental right” by prohibiting foreclosure on personal homes. With Prop 2 in 2008, voters required farms to give chickens and other animals enough room to lie down and fully extend their limbs. In 1998, they classified horses and ponies like dogs and cats as a way to ban the eating of horsemeat. The sky is the limit.

Until a judge struck it from the San Francisco ballot in July, voters there faced a measure to make it illegal to “circumcise, excise, cut or mutilate the whole or any part of the foreskin, testicles or penis of another person who has not attained the age of 18 years.”

But it’s only the rarest occasion when an initiative gets bounced from the ballot.

Because California embraced direct democracy as a way to battle the out-sized power of railroad barons over a century ago, its voters now receive thick stacks of information before every election, offering details on myriad matters that will be placed before them.

Often, really bad initiatives pass muster, usually after a well-funded campaign by unions or environmental interests. In 1988, for example, voters passed Proposition 98, which earmarks about 40 percent of the state’s general-fund budget to K-14 education — thus removing legislative (indeed, practically any) control over a huge portion of spending.

The average voter can at least understand the basics of condom use and circumcision. But many questions that are put before them — the creation of a stem-cell institute, electric deregulation, cap-and-trade systems, top-two primary proposals, pension reform — can be mind-numbingly complex.

The ads that flood in before Election Day only muddy the waters with sloganeering and distortions, paid for by the special-interest groups with the most to gain or lose from the vote.

Some self-proclaimed reformers want to rein in the initiatives, by making it harder to get one on the ballot or easier to knock it off. A new law pushes initiatives to the general election, thus limiting the passage of initiatives during lower-turnout polling days.

Yet despite the horrors and the abuse of the process, many of us are even more worried about limits on the initiative process — because California voters tilt fairly hard left in their preferences for candidates, but they tend to tilt right on ballot initiatives. For example, most initiative critics are still fuming about the passage of property-tax-limiting Proposition 13 in 1978, which helped spark a nationwide tax revolt.

The unions virtually own the California Legislature and most big-city governments. They know their bought-and-paid-for politicians will never reform pensions or introduce meaningful competition in the ill-performing public schools. The only hope for real taxpayer-friendly and conservative reforms is the initiative process.

If we limit the use of the initiative, Californians will have to rely on a Legislature that is a national laughingstock.

Sad to say, it’s probably better that Californians have to ponder mandatory condom use in San Fernando Valley porn films and circumcision in San Francisco than to cut out the one remaining avenue for circumventing a hopeless left-wing Legislature.

Steven Greenhut is editor of calwatchdog.com and a columnist for The Orange County Register.